Increase search traffic by enhancing your blog posts SEO.

Why should you worry about optimizing your blog posts? Blogs are powerful tools that help increase website traffic. With every blog post, you are creating a new webpage, which gives you another opportunity to reach your ideal customer and maximize site traffic. As much as you want potential customers to visit your website, Google wants to continue to be the leading search engine, by returning relevant quality pages on customer inquiries. This is why Google screens out bad behavior and is constantly correcting its search algorithms. To ensure all your blog posts are successfully crawled, separately optimize each with readable and easily indexed, relevant material.

Here are some recommendations intended to help engine bots crawl your content easily and rank your site higher, giving your customers an opportunity to see your blog.

1. Keywords Are Essential In Your Headline

Keywords help direct your target audience to the content they are looking for. That is why it is essential to have them in your blog headline. Narrow down to a few targeted keywords. If you were looking for information on this topic, what search terms would you use to try to find your site?

2. Ensure Accurate Page Title Tag Descriptions

Your page title will be what appears as the name of your webpage, while initiating a search. Page title tags are also heavily relied on for page ranking and describe to search engines what the purpose of your page is. Your headline and page title will work together to help drive traffic to your website. The tag should be an accurate 50 to 60-character description of the pages content, with important keywords appearing towards the front and your branding nearing the end.

3. Draw Attention To Your Blog Through Your Meta-Data Description

The meta-data description is a short 150 to 160-character paragraph that appears under your site title tag in search engine results. This description gives you the opportunity to advertise and draw readers into your site. Keywords should be placed intelligently into your paragraph, along with a compelling description, to make searchers want to click and choose to open your site page.

4. Blog Images Increase Clicks

Busy people love visual content. Use an image or video, to help aid people at a glance, and interest them to continue to read your page content. Every image must be optimized, as search engines can read text, but not pictures. Use a keyword as the file name and alternative text name of the image to insure easy search engine recognition. Readers who have images disabled in the browser will also see this, so make it easy to understand. Image file sizes should always be as small as possible, to reduce the risk of slowing down your site.

5. Writing Body Copy Content

Keyword saturation within your body copy should be about 1-3%. Do not overuse keywords, as it may seem that you are keyword stuffing to search engines. Focus on the quality of the content versus the word count. Create link relevancy by using anchor text, within your body content, which is an excellent way to link back to your website.

6. Link To Appropriate Pages On Your Website

Improve overall SEO and help your visitors gain more information from your content, by linking internally to your website. Inbound links like this will show search engines that your content is valid and relevant. It is about not only how good your site is, but also the sites that link back to you.

7. Use URL’s That Search Engines Understand

Google likes short, accurate and simple URL’s that describes the post content. Search engines will use the keywords within your URL to determine page relevancy and computing ranking

8. Share Your Blog Post Socially

Display your relevant content throughout a variety of social sites and generate site traffic.

9. Index Your Blog With Google

Send notifications to Google every time you publish or update a post, so the post is recognized and indexed. Make sure to also update your XML map.

The more traffic your blog receives, the more your site will climb in search engine rankings. To build site traffic and show your site is active, you need to consistently publish useful, optimized blog posts.

If you are looking for a powerful blogging tool, that will help you easily optimize your posts, we recommend WordPress. “WordPress will give you great search engine rank and results right out of the box. WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you.” Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team has stated. It will also automatically send notifications to Google for you, every time you publish or update a post or page. Netsonic offers a great WordPress solution.